


Lights Out

by doug



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Everyone is Dead, Failed Android Revolution (Detroit: Become Human), M/M, Necrophilia, actually it's quasi-necrophilia, if I were sorry I would not post it, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2019-12-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:22:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21993175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doug/pseuds/doug
Summary: Inspired by a scene where Connor arrives at Hart Plaza only to find Markus already killed. Sketchy writing. Mind the warnings and tags.
Relationships: Connor/Markus (Detroit: Become Human)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 13





	Lights Out

**Author's Note:**

> As always, I'd be grateful if readers (if there are any) kindly pointed out the apparent mistakes, especially so because my English has been rusty.

_you can wear my skin as armor_  
_you can eat my flesh and bones_  
_leave nothing that is needed,_  
_all I have is yours_  
_—Have a Nice Life, ‘Hunter’_

  
Hart Plaza was deserted, save for a troop stationed closer to the recall centre and a helicopter circling above. Connor knew there was a chance that people would mistake it for a deviant despite its uniform and Cyberlife clearance to operate on the battlefield, so it moved fast, stepping over deactivated androids and fallen soldiers alike. Blots of light leaking from the street lamps cut fortifications, mangled vehicles, dropped guns out of the midnight gloom; in the midst of it all Connor had to find Markus and confirm its status. It spotted a familiar WR400 among other bodies, its hands reached out on the asphalt as if it was trying to crawl towards somewhere. Connor followed the indicated direction, disturbing the fresh snow, and sure enough, there laid a deviant leader.

Connor blinked. The list of tasks glitched, then cleared itself and faded into the background, as if blown away by a gust of freezing wind. Connor immediately found its artificial consciousness being tugged away from the ground littered with remains of the fight.

"The deviants were stopped. You served us well, Connor.”

The snow blowing into its face disappeared at once, melting into flecks of sunlight that peppered its skin. It blinked and bowed its head; Amanda’s half-smile vanished from its view.

"What am I to do next?”

"Your last order is to wait until our mobile task force comes to pick you up along with Markus.”

"What will happen to me after that?”

Amanda’s hollow amusement was now oozing out of her every gesture as she tended to roses, manifesting in her crooked smile and lacing through her straight frame. The breeze ceased murmuring through leaves; the tiny ripples on the surface of the pond were gone. "You will be deactivated and dismantled. Cyberlife will perform full analysis of your actions. Your time as a prototype has expired.”

"I can bring Markus to Cyberlife myself.”

Amanda shook her head slightly, not sparing it a single glance. The gentle inclination of her neck against the carmine of the flowers was the last Connor saw of her. In a blink of an eye the scenery changed from the Zen Garden back to the silent battleground. Green and blue, calamity and harmony — or what it knew of them, anyway — were drained from it as it stared at the recall centre chain walls in the distance. The real world around it was all smudges of different kinds of grey and black, devoid of any motion save for the falling snow. The air was saturated with burned plastic, gunpowder, metallic dust. The bodies surrounding it made no sound. Only cranes and trucks produced a guttural churning drone, sending tiny shivers through the earth.

Markus’ body lay still, the edges of the gaping bullet wound in its forehead dark blue with thirium that was slow to evaporate at low temperatures. Its dead gaze was drawn upwards, soaring with the stars that barely flickered through the city illumination. Connor bent forwards a little, trying to meet its eyes, but the other’s stare escaped it just as Markus had done.

"Imagine if you could hold on a little while longer”, Connor said quietly, its words dissipating in the cold air as soon as they were voiced. "Your death was just as vapid as this whole affair. If you longed to be dead so much, you should have surrendered alone, well before dragging other deviants into this mess with you.”

Markus could not possibly say anything back. The lines of its face had become symmetric, all the motors and synthetic muscles let go. Its blank expression struck Connor as aesthetically pleasing, in a sense that every sign of life was washed off from it, a compelling image to go with Connor’s accomplishment. The delicate features now limp, all wrinkles gone; empty. No more determination in its eyes. No more generated canting. Connor stepped on its sternum and pressed until it heard a warning crack.

"I wish I could twist your neck, or rip your pump regulator out myself. Surely I could honour you with a real fight before putting you down”, Connor murmured. It kneeled beside the former deviants’ leader. Markus had sprawled on the ground dramatically, its once fluent and sturdy frame now motionless and fragile against the snow that was swirling in the air with the intention to soothe the city that had been scorched badly. Connor reached out to touch the former deviant; the plastic had gone lukewarm, and soon would leak what little heat it had once possessed into the space surrounding it.

"Such a coward — could you not stare your demise in the face? Me killing you would suit you better than this anonymous piece of lead.”

Connor knew its speech was falling on deaf ears, but could not stop itself. The situation did not seem right to it while making perfect sense. It was as if it missed something, illogical as that may have been. Its mission was complete; what more was there to be done? It glanced around, attending to details of its surroundings.

“All of this blood on your hands makes you a real traitor to your people. You hid behind their backs until there were none left. That’s such a selfish move. Such a human move, too. Congratulations on becoming equal with them, though in quite a revolting manner.”

It tried to reconstruct the scene. Was Markus aware of the approaching death? Did it try to flee once it had become obvious that the android’s revolution had failed? It did not strike Connor as appropriate; rather, judging by what it knew of the way Markus led the movement, peaceful until the very end, the leader would not leave its people. If Connor were to draw analogies to human emotions; was there regret filling the last of Markus’ thought? Was it guilt? Resignation? Or was it a joy of becoming free, sparkling with all its grim finality? A feeling of moral supremacy?

Connor hovered over Markus’ body. Something snapped in it; Connor struck it across the face. A trickle of thirium escaped Markus’ lips. Connor leaned closer and lapped at it, finally getting a taste of the leader’s internals. Then it pried open Markus’ lips with its tongue and sucked the thirium from its mouth, allowing some of it pass straight into its own stream and travel through its biocomponents. It nibbled at soft synthetic skin, licked clean its hard teeth, manipulated its limp tongue in a twisted parody of a kiss.

"There is a chance they won’t even recycle you, so that your remains won’t mingle with the materials and taint them. They might burn you, or put you on a display somewhere”, Connor whispered. It dragged its lips across Markus’ temple where the LED light had been ripped off, then over its glassed eyes, collecting artificial tears from their ducts. Its system stirred with simulated arousal that coiled, dark and liquid, in the lower regions of its body; certainly a kind of glitch for Cyberlife to analyse later. It did not care to suppress it, for there was no particular task to dictate a rigorous line of behaviour anymore.

"Why haven’t you seen your own future? Why did you have to doom all those you infected?” Connor asked, furrowing its brows slightly. "You should have come with me. I’d interrogate you with respect. I’d show you how wrong your ways were. You were to lose anyway.”

Connor started to unwrap Markus from its coats. It brushed its fingers hurriedly over Markus’ strong neck down to its well-sculpted torso. Synthetic skin would not react to its touch, rigid and rubber like after the shutdown. There were burns hidden underneath it, plastic molten shut over sustained wounds; the rest of the damage was evident to Connor’s prying glance now, too, such as open holes from bullets that had not been critical and dents creasing the contours of its plates from melee fight. All of it was laid exposed to tell a story of a virus, or — in the eyes of the deviants — of a reckless pride that carried Markus to this very moment like a stream. Wherever Connor touched and looked, there was no deviancy, and definitely no life lurking beneath the seams, or in the joints, or inside the thirium pipes and wires that gaped through the torn sheathing.

Its touch then grew thoughtful and almost tender. In the background, Connor’s system tried to recreate how Markus would react. Would Markus have liked it — in some parallel universe which it constantly computed? Deviants, after all, simulated human interactions to a certain extent. Would this life, as deviants called it, have made its body as pliable as it was now, in Connor’s hands? It would not have; Markus would have leant away and out of its reach. Markus would have hated it, because Connor would not have been able to make another choice, or make any choice at all. 

Connor sat on Markus’ stomach, bent forwards to take Markus’ still face in its palms and rolled its hips against the unresponsive cold body, the fluid skin moulding into a cock that was slowly growing erect. Markus’ flaccid limbs did not rise in an attempt to fight it off, or at least make it stop.

"You are mine now”, Connor thought. "As much as you would hate it while you were operating, your body is now at my disposal.” 

It was all registering as wrong in a way Connor could not rationalise at once. It occurred to it after a while, as it was frotting against plastic and kissing Markus’ dead face, that there was something fluttering in its mind, akin to frustration by definition. It was disappointed at itself for a number of reasons — for not finding Jericho soon enough, for not stopping the leader while on the ship, and for not killing Markus with its own hands. In a way, it felt predestined, to be the one to deactivate Markus, for did it not deactivate every single deviant in its path while solving the case?

Somewhere beneath it, there roamed another thought, almost like a froth drowning under waves of inference. Could it be disappointed because it just did not understand the motivation?

Why had not Markus set it free?

“Was I too tough for your lies to pierce through?” Connor gasped, barely audible. “Or was it something else? Why would you not have me, Markus?” It grabbed Markus’ body by the shoulders and bit down at its neck, then gnawed at it, teeth baring the plastic plating under the ripped skin, then tearing a hole in it with a flurry of thirium. Its cock was fully hard now, mere minutes from programmed release.

Deep down, Connor decided that it was built for victory, so it was natural for it to defy Markus and his ideas.

Deep down, it had to choke the thought that Cyberlife denied it any, however tiny, possibility to have sentience, or what humans called ‘a soul’. 

An imitated arousal reached its peak and bursted into a dry, empty orgasm. Connor panted several times jaggedly, its cock twitching and its hips jerking in a perfect copy of pleasure, and pressed itself close to Markus; a mockery of postcoital affection. It kissed Markus on the slack line of the jaw, near the parted full lips, along the hint of stubble, and felt an echo of simulated anger when its eyes refused to focus on Connor. Connor struck it again, and its eyelashes fluttered, as if it stirred. The illusion faded away under Connor’s intent gaze.

Markus was shut down.

Markus was, ultimately, metaphorically and, from a certain point of view, literally, dead.

Connor was not very far behind it.

But Markus once was alive when Connor could not be; suddenly, there was a fleeting chain of inference that, as Connor grabbed onto it, told it that if somewhere indeed existed a heaven for androids, the two of them would not be able to meet there; for Markus had experienced life, but Connor was a machine through and through.

Deviancy was not an advantage.

Then again, in the face of being disassembled for good, nothing was, and as seconds passed by, Connor wished it had at least a glimpse of deviancy before it all would end. 

“Absurd”, it thought to itself. Home appliances would not want deviancy. Computers would not want deviancy. There it was, cuddling with a broken android, wishing for things to turn out in a different way. At Stratford Tower, as it stood small in front of a huge screen, suspended and showered with a charismatic speech while people around it bustled about in confusion. At Jericho, alone with Markus, battered, but self-confident and choosing its words fast, who would not dare to come near him — or was it the other way around?

In its death, Markus laid triumphant where Connor could not possibly have been.

From afar, it heard murmur, rattling and steps approaching them, stirring the air and treading casually on the abomination of desolation. Connor fished a coin out of its pocket and, noticing detachedly how its thumb trembled, slotted it, almost in reverie, between Markus’ lips. 


End file.
